What you need to know about iTunes Match: your questions answered

Will iTunes Match identify you as a dirty pirate to the RIAA? Will your …

This fall Apple will offer iTunes users a paid add-on to its iCloud music syncing called iTunes Match. The service will let you mirror your iTunes library on iCloud, making it possible to access any track on any device you have registered with your Apple ID for a yearly $24.99 subscription fee.

The service has some limitations and perhaps one interesting "loophole," and questions exist concerning what exactly happens when you stop paying $25 every year. We decided to dig in and find out exactly what users can expect when the service rolls out in a few months.

iTunes Match will let you mirror up to 25,000 tracks in your iCloud, and those songs can be pulled down to any iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, as well as synced with Macs or PCs running iTunes. This includes tracks ripped from CDs or downloaded from the Internet, even those you may have obtained in a less-than-legal manner.

As rumored, Apple's efforts to strike licensing deals with record labels gives its music-in-the-cloud service one major feature over recently announced competing services from Amazon and Google. That feature is the namesake of iTunes Match—using the song match technology acquired from Lala, it scans your iTunes library to find matches among the 18 million tracks in the iTunes Store.

If there is a match found in the iTunes Store catalog, that track is automatically and immediately added to your iCloud store in 256Kbps, DRM-free iTunes Plus format. Even if you have a crappy 128Kbps mp3 rip, if iTunes Match can identify it, you'll immediately have access to the iTunes Plus version.

If there is no match for your obscure French electronica or Detroit garage punk songs, those will be uploaded as-is to your iCloud store. So in theory, you only have to upload a small portion of your collection of music.

If you don't renew the yearly $25 subscription, your iCloud store goes away. iTunes purchases will still be available to all devices, and anything that you have downloaded from iCloud to your devices you keep. This includes iTunes Plus versions you have chosen to replace older, lower quality rips in your main iTunes library. Apple explained that replacing those lower-quality rips is optional.

Fortune noted that this process presents somewhat of a "loophole" for dirty pirates to essentially pay $25 for "amnesty" of up to 25,000 tracks. We don't entirely agree, though. There doesn't appear to be a reliable way for Apple to know for certain if a particular song has been pirated—barring certain metadata that could be easily stripped out—so really the only benefit is that low-quality rips get replaced with high-quality rips.

A lot of readers asked if Apple shares any information about users' scanned libraries with third parties. Apple tells Ars "no," so the RIAA won't suddenly have a list of every song you ever downloaded or ripped. For the purposes of accounting, though, the company does share aggregate information about which tracks are being added to iCloud via iTunes Match. In other words, EMI will be able to know that 2 million users have Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" in their library, but not which particular users have it.

Another question our readers asked was what happens if your library is filled with higher quality rips, such as tracks encoded in Apple Lossless (ALAC) format. Matched tracks will still be in 256Kbps iTunes Plus format, while uploaded tracks will retain their original format. Tracks aren't replaced in either your iTunes library or on your devices unless you request them to be, so the lossless files in your main iTunes library will be safe. Sticklers might balk that matched tracks won't be available via iCloud in a higher-quality format, but if you don't require lossless quality on your mobile device, having access to smaller 256kbps AAC files via iCloud may be a benefit.

Our international readers wanted to know if iTunes Match will be available outside of the US. Unfortunately, for now, iTunes Match is limited to US iTunes Store users. While the service may eventually be available to users in other parts of the world, it will require inking agreements with record labels, music publishers, and other rightsholders for each separate country or region. Apple may be in the process of doing that now, but the company said there is nothing to announce regarding availability of iTunes Match outside the US at this time.

214 Reader Comments

I like the clever infographic. It's missing one demographic, though: those who will not pay Apple or anyone else to access music they already own.

It's also missing those who like smashing their heads against a wall.

You don't pay Apple for accessing the music you already own (if you own it you can obviously access it anyway), you pay Apple for storing it on their servers for you. And for offering versions with better quality to you. Do you expect them to do this for free?

Storing it on their servers why? So you can ACCESS it from wherever you are. No, I don't expect them to do it for free; I don't expect them to do it at all.

Is my access to iCloud content continuously updated in real-time? If music is removed from my iTunes library (say hard drive crash), is access to it via iCould remove instantly or is there a time period in which I can sync all my music back up once I rebuild my Mac?

the company said there is nothing to announce regarding availability of iTunes Match outside the US at this time.

Won't happen in Canada. There's a double standard here. Media companies can rip off artists to their hearts content without consequence beyond a vague promise "sorry we stole your song, IOU". And then the same media companies demand that even camera flash cards be charged a "tariff" to pay those same companies gobs of money for copies of songs they assume exist out there, because the only reason to buy storage media is to steal music.

The concept of the iTunes Match is probably giving music execs up here aneurysms as we speak.

Is my access to iCloud content continuously updated in real-time? If music is removed from my iTunes library (say hard drive crash), is access to it via iCould remove instantly or is there a time period in which I can sync all my music back up once I rebuild my Mac?

I think this is the whole point of iCloud. You can remove media freely from your computers/devices and then retrive it from iCloud when you want it back. iCloud essentially becomes your "master" collection (though it won't force you to remove anything from your local machines). I'd expect anything uploaded to iCloud will stay there unless you explicitly tell iCloud to remove it.

One question (someone else mentioned it in comments as well) - I have a bunch of old DRMed iTunes music I bought years ago and never bothered to pay to update to the new non-DRM iTunes Plus versions. My understanding is, I don't need to pay for iTunes Plus upgrades at all from now on? I can just re-download the higher bitrate DRM-free versions for free?

"A lot of readers asked if Apple shares any information about users' scanned libraries with third parties. Apple tells Ars "no," so the RIAA won't suddenly have a list of every song you ever downloaded or ripped."

Judging from how fast Apple flip flop on many of its iOS terms, how often Apple change the TOS, and how the US congress is only interested on industry who can provide them money instead of regular folks...

Don't be surprised when Apple suddenly change their mind and start sharing the information, or start to secretly share the information, or the congress pass a law requiring Apple to share the information.

Wow. My post where I described my more than 50/50 mix of iTMS to non-iTMS music just made me realize I have spent several wallet-loads of money on music on iTunes since 2005... Something around 3,900 tracks from iTunes? Sure, many of those were at considerably less than the 99c point because they were part of an album, but still... Apple and the recording industry must love me.

No one needs this service at home, as everyone keeps their music collection at home. EVERYONE, as much as that term applies to anything.

The only environment this service makes sense if in mobile. So you've got your iPhone or other smart phone and you use it as a portable mp3 player. Then when on the go instead of only having a few gigabytes worth of music (which honestly is enough for most day trips) you can stream your whole library.

That sounds great but honestly mobile broadband in this country is too expensive and too slow for this to have any actual merit. So even if you live in an area serviced by fast enough mobile broadband to stream your music anywhere you might go in town you'll still be spending a lot of money every month for going over your bandwidth limit, on top of the $25/month fee for the service from Apple and of course the base cost of your mobile broadband service.

Eh, I'd rather save the money and buy a big SD card. Then I won't have to worry that my music will cut off once I drive past the city limit.

No one needs this service at home, as everyone keeps their music collection at home. EVERYONE, as much as that term applies to anything.

The only environment this service makes sense if in mobile. So you've got your iPhone or other smart phone and you use it as a portable mp3 player. Then when on the go instead of only having a few gigabytes worth of music (which honestly is enough for most day trips) you can stream your whole library.

That sounds great but honestly mobile broadband in this country is too expensive and too slow for this to have any actual merit. So even if you live in an area serviced by fast enough mobile broadband to stream your music anywhere you might go in town you'll still be spending a lot of money every month for going over your bandwidth limit, on top of the $25/month fee for the service from Apple and of course the base cost of your mobile broadband service.

Eh, I'd rather save the money and buy a big SD card. Then I won't have to worry that my music will cut off once I drive past the city limit.

Does it actually stream anything, or just allow you to download the tracks into iTunes on the mobile device? I can't find anything on Apple's site that refers to streaming, just "push" or "add to library."

First, I really love that Venn diagram. It made me smile. Nicely done!

Second, I am a little bummed about not supporting lossless formats. True for mobile media consumption that's not really an issue, since music is kind of a background activity (mostly) and the background noise in on-the-go would make lossless a complete waste. However, this is one of the things that's keeping me from ditching physical CDs. If you've got high-end stereo gear you're just not going to be satisfied with a lossy format. If they went lossless, I'd be all over this.

Third: Tell me more about this "iTunes Plus" format. I have some other non-Apple devices that I like to use like a Bose radio (it's our alarm clock) and a CD changer in my car that plays MP3's. Is "iTunes Plus" based on MP3 or is it a completely different CODEC? I suppose I could always transcode these when ripping them to media--though depending on the encoder implementation and HW that could be too time consuming to do on-the-fly. Also transcoding from one lossy format to another sounds like sound quality could really suffer.

I like the clever infographic. It's missing one demographic, though: those who will not pay Apple or anyone else to access music they already own.

It's also missing those who like smashing their heads against a wall.

You don't pay Apple for accessing the music you already own (if you own it you can obviously access it anyway), you pay Apple for storing it on their servers for you. And for offering versions with better quality to you. Do you expect them to do this for free?

Storing it on their servers why? So you can ACCESS it from wherever you are. No, I don't expect them to do it for free; I don't expect them to do it at all.

I don't understand. Do you mean that you don't want Apple doing this for you because there is no value due to how you have your media organized, or are you saying that Apple shouldn't provide this service to anyone? If a company can provide a service, a consumer values the service, both mutually agree to the terms, and nothing illegal is happening . . . what's the big deal?

Does it actually stream anything, or just allow you to download the tracks into iTunes on the mobile device? I can't find anything on Apple's site that refers to streaming, just "push" or "add to library."

Nope. You're right. No streaming, just downloading. It's an online persistent backup service for your music collection that integrates with iTunes and iPods/iPads/iPhones, not a streaming service.

How is this not exaclty like Napster? Apple's neat avoidance of the whole piracy issue is exactly the defense Napster tried to use in court (but they already have the song your honour, no way to prove it wasn't legally purchased! Innocent until proven, etc)

If apple can do this for $25/yr including all their hosting costs, the 'licensing fee' must have been teeny tiny?!

I want to know if I can create mp3s of white noise with song lengths and metadata matching an album, add it to my local library, and watch the full-quality version appear in my iCloud.

I want to know if it's worth anyone's while to do so, considering the length of time needed to create a white noise track of the correct length, add the meta data and add it to iTunes.

Sure, if the match is done by metadata/song length rather than a digital signature, someone will produce an app to do it automatically, but it's really just easier to get a copy from a friend, rip a CD, buy on iTunes or Amazon or eMusic, or grab it online somewhere.

I like the clever infographic. It's missing one demographic, though: those who will not pay Apple or anyone else to access music they already own.

It's also missing those who like smashing their heads against a wall.

You don't pay Apple for accessing the music you already own (if you own it you can obviously access it anyway), you pay Apple for storing it on their servers for you. And for offering versions with better quality to you. Do you expect them to do this for free?

Storing it on their servers why? So you can ACCESS it from wherever you are. No, I don't expect them to do it for free; I don't expect them to do it at all.

So you're part of the "I don't care" part? Which is totally fine, btw. Or are you complaining that they offer it at all to those who do care? Sorry, I have trouble following you.

It's an AAC (MP4) format, .m4a extenstion. It's the same format as the pre-2009 iTunes files, but at a higher bitrate and without DRM. You're correct that transcoding an MP3 file to AAC will degrade the sound quality further. I'm guessing most people don't care.

I have a library thats quite a bit more than 25k songs. I suppose a lot of folks already do and by this fall probably more will. How will this icloud select which songs to match or rather how do you select which songs you want in the cloud?

First, I really love that Venn diagram. It made me smile. Nicely done!

Second, I am a little bummed about not supporting lossless formats. True for mobile media consumption that's not really an issue, since music is kind of a background activity (mostly) and the background noise in on-the-go would make lossless a complete waste. However, this is one of the things that's keeping me from ditching physical CDs. If you've got high-end stereo gear you're just not going to be satisfied with a lossy format. If they went lossless, I'd be all over this.

Third: Tell me more about this "iTunes Plus" format. I have some other non-Apple devices that I like to use like a Bose radio (it's our alarm clock) and a CD changer in my car that plays MP3's. Is "iTunes Plus" based on MP3 or is it a completely different CODEC? I suppose I could always transcode these when ripping them to media--though depending on the encoder implementation and HW that could be too time consuming to do on-the-fly. Also transcoding from one lossy format to another sounds like sound quality could really suffer.

iTunes by default has used the AAC codec for CD ripping for quite some time. AAC, being the audio component of the MPEG4 specification, allowed for DRM, which is what they used for the first several years of the iTunes Music Store. iTunes Plus was Apple's marketing term for when they were upselling customers to DRM-free 256-kbit AAC audio instead of the DRMed 128-kbit AAC audio files they were selling before (and for a while, simultaneously as the 99cent option versus iTunes Plus's $1.29). A while ago Apple stopped selling DRMed audio files altogether, making all of the music it sells iTunes Plus. (I do believe they still use the moniker to differentiate DRMed music videos versus non-DRMed videos, though, as video DRM seems to be up to the publisher.)

So, in short, iTunes Plus in this context is 256kbps mpeg4 (aac) audio.

So I don't have to spend money on iTunes Plus upgrades on my music now, I just wait, pay $25, and get them all upgraded. Nice!

Is this true? I'm hopeful, and it seems like it should be, but I'm still not sure. I have ~$230 worth of iTunes Plus upgrades I haven't pulled the trigger on, and have been getting closer and closer to finally paying for them.

I think you actually do it now. Go to the iTunes Store, click the "Purchases" link (or something like that, I did it last night) and it let me redownload all of my music in whatever quality iTunes had it in (I assume all iTunes Plus).

auhim wrote:

The 5GB file limit is interesting to me. I'm not sure how much of my music won't match. I've got about ~7700-7800 tracks...I'm curious to see how close I'll get to the 5GB limit.

If you subscribe to iTunes Match you (a) get unlimited storage of any songs iTunes can match to their catalog and (b) get *at least* space for 25,000 songs that don't match iTunes catalog.

The 5GB limit is for the free iCloud account only. It won't limit your iTunes Match numbers, where no hard storage limit has been mentioned (only a casual mention of 25,000 songs on Apple's site).

I have a library thats quite a bit more than 25k songs. I suppose a lot of folks already do and by this fall probably more will. How will this icloud select which songs to match or rather how do you select which songs you want in the cloud?

I have a library that is 95 GB in size and only 12k songs. I tend to rip/download in 320k a lot but seriously you think a lot of people have that big of a library?

I may shell out for one year's worth of this nonsense (which is it's annual and not monthly subscription) because it's better than paying $50+ to free my old iTunes tracks (which, if you redownload them today, still come down as 128K DRM'd files. Gotta get the iTunes Plus money while the getting's good, huh, Apple?)

It's 2005 and I start noticing that my daughter has been using my CD library as coasters or some other toy so I copy everything over to my iTunes account to keep it from being lost to permanent sippy cup hell. I then start subscribing to this cloud thing so my music is accessible to multiple portable devices. I like the convenience so much that I have long since stopped keeping local copies of anything. I'm loving life for 3-5 years when I move to Alaska or Oklahoma or somewhere without broadband. Do I get to download my iCloud library to a local iTunes library, including all the files from my original CD's? Or am I required to maintain the ICloud subscription to legally maintain local copies of those songs?

What if you have over 25,000 songs? I have a decent sized collection, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one that has more than 25,000.

Two things:

1) Music that matches songs in iTunes won't count against your 25,000 song limit. I'm not sure how a person gets to 25,000 songs (a lot of live / bootleg stuff?), but if a large fraction of those match what Apple is already storing for iTunes, you're safe.

2) While Apple mentions the cost for storing 25,000 songs on Amazon vs. Apple, I've never seen a hard limit posted as to how many unmatched songs you can store. I'm not saying there isn't this limit (SJ might have said something on stage), but it isn't published anywhere that I saw.

There hasn't been any mention of options for those with more than 25k songs. Like many others here, my library is quite a bit bigger than that. Personally, I'd be more than happy to pay the same rate for my larger library (0.1¢/song/yr.). $50/year for 50k tracks, etc., seems more than reasonable. Here's hoping they offer it.

I like the clever infographic. It's missing one demographic, though: those who will not pay Apple or anyone else to access music they already own.

It's also missing those who like smashing their heads against a wall.

You don't pay Apple for accessing the music you already own (if you own it you can obviously access it anyway), you pay Apple for storing it on their servers for you. And for offering versions with better quality to you. Do you expect them to do this for free?

Storing it on their servers why? So you can ACCESS it from wherever you are. No, I don't expect them to do it for free; I don't expect them to do it at all.

What is your point here? That you don't want to pay for someone to keep an online cache of your music files? Honestly, I am having trouble understanding what you are arguing against here-is there an issue I'm not aware of?

I am curious how this will work with tracks that are in the iTunes Music Store but not available in all countries.

For example, I listen to a lot of German music that I know is in the German iTunes store, but I cannot purchase here in the US because I don't have a German credit card. In a lot of cases I've imported CDs and ripped them. Will iTunes Match be able to pull songs from the German catalog when it finds them in my library?